Environment

06/01/2013

Are you planning a trip to the Antarctic any time soon? A sojourn in the jungles of Papua New Guinea? A ramble through the isolated northern Amazon?

If not, set aside a couple of hours for the Royal Ontario Museum’s journey to the ends of the Earth through the lens of Brazilian uber-photog Sebastiao Salgado.

Salgado, 69, began his career as an economist, but abandoned the ivory tower for the grassroots, trekking with his camera kit to meet the people who are on the sharp end of economic policy – the forgotten, the desperately poor, the displaced.

The ROM exhibition, Genesis, is a new chapter for Salgado. Instead of chronicling hell on Earth, he spent eight years recording his view of an earthly paradise for posterity: his “love letter to the planet.”

It was a painful transition. His decades of capturing human misery had left him depressed and exhausted, ready to shelve his cameras. And returning to southeast Brazil in the 1990s he was shocked to see that not only people, but land was in crisis – the lush landscape he remembered withered and dying from unsustainable farming.

He and his wife and collaborator, Lelia Wanick Salgado, created Instituto Terra, a non-profit group that replanted nearly 2 million trees, bringing it back to vibrant life. The result led to project Genesis.

It was a gruelling but rewarding eight-year trek through the pristine beauty of remote places, both inhabited and free from human footprints.

His stark, multi-dimensional black and white photos are almost sculptural in quality. The viewer is drawn into them hypnotically. Missing are the unseen human forces that are destroying the territory they depict: pollution, globalization, overpopulation, climate change.

“I want people to understand that this is the only world we have,” Salgado told CBC. “I believe…we’ve arrived at the break-even point. From here we cannot cross. We’ve already destroyed too much.”

05/14/2013

North
Dakota has
seen some wild temperature swings, as has a lot of the U.S. (Jim Gehrz/Minneapolis
Star Tribune/MCT)

Those making bitter mental notes on 2013 as the year
spring never came, behold the phenomenon of "Weather Whiplash" that
is taking hold in the central U.S.,
where near-record cold to near-record heat is happening with astonishing speed.

The topsy-turvy changes are especially weird in
places like Chicago, which awakened to near-freezing temps Monday morning but
is today expected to top out at 30.5 C. And Bismarck,
N.D., and Aberdeen, S.D.,
also saw similarly extreme swings in the span of a single day, rocketing to
roasting temps with each passing hour.

The extremes are discussed in detail here by
Weather Underground's resident historian Christopher C. Burt, who traces the
powerful surge of warm air flowing into the central U.S.

Accuweather.com is tracking the same phenomenon,
noting the Midwest heat will lose some of its steam as
it shifts east. But the charges are still noteworthy, with the Buffalo area shifting
from snow flurries Monday to T-shirt temps tomorrow.

A surge of comments on Burt's post suggest the
phenomenon, though rare, is not unique, citing the "long winter" of
1881 that was later described in an episode of "Little House on the
Prairie." One commenter adds: "Cynics say you know you're in the
midwest when you need both your furnace and AC on the same day."

Mitch Potter is the Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third
foreign posting after previous assignments to London
and Jerusalem.
Potter led the Toronto Star’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
where he won a 2006 National Newspaper Award for his reportage. His dispatches
include datelines from 33 countries since 2000. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites

05/09/2013

A photo from August 2010 shows a Kenya Wildlife Services ranger standing guard over an ivory haul as it is moved through Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi. (AFP)

Bad news about elephants just doesn’t seem to end, does it?

World Wildlife Fund says poachers have entered one of Africa’s unique elephant habitats, Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, in Cameroon.

A group of 17 armed “individuals” entered the park earlier this week and headed for the Dzanga Bai, locally known as the “village of elephants," a large clearing where between 50 and 200 elephants congregate every day to drink mineral salts present in the sands, said a WWF news release

Reportedly, two WWF-supported local researchers were approached by some members of this armed group in the forest on Monday, asking for food and directions to a viewing tower used by scientists and tourists to observe elephants.

The researchers said they gave a false lead and ran away. But they soon heard gunshots.

It is not exactly clear what happened after.

“Unless swift and decisive action is taken, it appears highly likely that poachers will take advantage of the chaos and instability of the country to slaughter the elephants living in this unique World Heritage Site,” Jim Leape, WWF international director general said in the statement.

In Bouba N’Djida, Cameroon’s other national park, poachers killed at least 300 elephants in February 2012.

There were up to 5 million elephants in Africa 70 years ago. Today, just several hundred thousand are left and in the past year, an estimated 32,000 elephants have been killed for their ivory.

Black-market ivory sells for about $1,300 (CDN) per pound.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

05/08/2013

Nearly half of the world's wild-caught fish are ground up into fishmeal and fed to farmed fish, cattle and pigs.

It's a huge business. Last year Chile exported at least $535 million worth of fishmeal, while Peru sold a staggering $1.6 billion, The New York Times reported.

As environmental activists warn the world's oceans are fast depleting, an African company has come up with a possible solution to the problem: flies and maggots.

In Cape Town Tuesday night, South African tech firm AgriProtein won a $100,000 prize for "technological innovation" sponsored by the UN. AgriProtein, which is also working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has developed a new product it calls Magmeal.

AgriProtein breeds flies at its production facility near Cape Town. A single female fly can lay between 750 to over 1,000 eggs per week. The eggs will then hatch into larvae, according to a profile of the company written last year by the website TradeInvestAfrica.

"Larvae go through three life stages in a 72-hour period, and are
harvested just becoming pupae. The harvested larvae are then dried on a
fluidised bed dryer, milled into flake form and packed according to
customers’ preferences," according to the report.

Chickens and other livestock should have no problem eating the dried maggots instead of fishmeal, the company figures.

AgriProtein was among 900 applications from 45 countries who bid on the 2013 Innovation Prize for Africa Awards.

According to Techmoran.com, some other finalists included: SavvyLoo, an eco waterless toilet that drains liquids
from solids for environmental impact; The TBag Water Filter, a filter that cleans polluted water and The Malaria pf/PAN Test Kit, a malaria treatment test that determines within 30 minutes if treatment is effective.

Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

05/07/2013

A Nigerian farmer holds cassava roots. Experts have reported new outbreaks of virus that damage the vegetable crop. (AFP photo)

Cassava, the vegetable that could be Africa’s miracle crop, is in trouble.

Scientists say a disease destroying entire crops has spread out of East Africa and into the heart of the continent and is attacking plants as far south as Angola and now threatens to move west into Nigeria, the world’s biggest producer of the potato-like root that helps feed 500 million Africans.

Claude Fauquet, co-founder of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century, told The Associated Press that the devastating results are already dramatic today but could be catastrophic tomorrow if nothing is done to halt the Cassava Brown Streak Disease, or CBSD.

He said that Africa is losing as much as 50 million tonnes of cassava each year to the disease.

The tropical root vegetable grows well in poor quality soil and high temperatures, making it resistant to climate change. It requires almost no labour to grow.

That’s not all: its roots are rich in carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. It is already a dietary staple throughout the continent, and it could feed more. The vegetable can also be used as an industrial starch to produce plywood, textiles and paper.

It is also a vital cash-crop for millions of small farmers.

But now, there are fears that the epidemic is pushing into West Africa, and could reach Nigeria. Fauquet said scientists must act fast to keep it from reaching West Africa.

A group of scientists are meeting in Italy this week to work out a plan to fight the disease that is killing cassava. The conference is "dedicated to declaring war on cassava viruses in Africa."

05/06/2013

With a population of 1.2 billion, India is among the fastest-growing countries and is poised during our lifetime to eclipse China as the world's largest.

That well-documented growth has led to a near-unrivalled thirst both for electricity and water. The World Resources Institute has estimated India is planning on building 455 new coal power plants -- four times as many that exists now.

India also recently proposed the building of 292 new dams through the Himalayas, which would double the country's hydropower capacity and perhaps help deal with the power outages that have become daily occurrences in large cities like New Delhi and Mumbai.

Amid worries about how the environment might be impacted by the many changes comes news out of western India of a novel method for dealing with two environmental problems.

The panels will produce electricity and also reduce evaporation of the canal water by as much as 237,750 gallons each year, Gujarat's state government says.

India faces a looming water crisis.

I wrote about this in 2009, noting that thanks to global warming and other environmental woes, India's agricultural
output may be carved by 40 per cent over the next 70 years, according to the Center
for Global Development, a U.S.-based think-tank.

Gujarat guarantees premium prices for the solar electricity, and those subsidies have helped the state become one of the largest renewable energy producing states in the country, according to a report on technology website GigaOM.

The Indian project, which produces 1 megawatt of electricity, covers a small section of the 458 kilometre canal.

Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

05/03/2013

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” says Lauren Bacall’s famous line from To Have and Have Not. “You just put your lips together and blow.”

If only it were that simple.

For whistleblowers, who go up against corporations, governments and organized criminals, it can be the most difficult decision of a lifetime.

John Graham, director of Giraffe Heroes International – a U.S.-based group that celebrates those who stick their necks out for the common good – says that although there are some advances to help whistleblowers, in some cases it’s also getting harder.

“Technology makes it easier, because it’s easier to uncover the nasty stuff that’s going on,” says the retired American diplomat. “The hard part is that in the U.S., for instance, employers are trying to get access to employees' emails.”

And he adds, “the bottom line is it still takes a lot of guts.”

That’s clear from the treatment of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who was locked up in conditions human rights advocates have called torture on suspicion of sending classified government emails to WikiLeaks. Or the fate of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Moscow jail after blowing the whistle on a huge alleged tax fraud scheme.

Neither is on the giraffe list. But many lower profile giraffes are sticking their necks out every day, and paying a heavy price. Graham himself was put on a no-fly list by the Bush administration after Sept. 11 – and in spite of his diplomatic connections has never been able to find out why, or remove his name.

On the Giraffe Heroes database is an exhaustive list of ordinary people who have sacrificed much to do what they believe is the right thing.

Like Zimbabwean Farai Maguwu, who documented the brutality of President Robert Mugabe’s security forces when they attacked poor “illegal” miners and local civilians in the country's diamond fields. He was imprisoned for six months and is under constant surveillance. But he continues fighting for justice and a fair share of Zimbabwe’s rich resources for all its people.

Or lawyer and environmental activist Meena Raman of Malaysia, who stood in front of tractors to stop dumping of radioactive waste in areas that were home to 10,000 people. She was thrown into jail, but the offending company closed down.

Or Justine Masika Bihamba, whose life has been threatened and family forced to flee the dangerous eastern Democratic Republic of Congo because of her ongoing campaign to seek medical, social and legal help for women who have been savagely raped.

Or Northrup Grumman Corp. comptroller Jean-Francois Truong of Los Angeles, who went up against the aerospace giant in court with allegations of fraud, including huge cost overruns on the B-2 bomber,. He exposed the misuse of public money, embarrassing the company and the government.

These are just a few of dozens of people whose courage earned them a giraffe citation. For readers looking for hope and change, the website should be required reading. It’s a bracing change from the often dismal news of the day.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards, including the Michener Award for public service journalism.

Well, scientists trying to track Bengal tigers are also using a unique method: tracking poop.

Here is why: Bengal tigers are native to Southeast Asia and there are about 1,850 in the wild. But since it’s tough to count them because they are so elusive, researchers in Nepal have developed a system they think will make it easier to figure out how many tigers live there. They are using genetic data out of their poop, reports Mother Jones.

True thing.

The Nepal Tiger Genome Project has collected more than a thousand samples from the southern part of the country known as the Terai Arc landscape, believed to be one of the last remaining tiger habitats. DNA from the poop allows researchers to study and catalog the genetic material and to create a database of all the country’s tigers.

To gather the samples, the project sent surveyors — armed with specimen vials and field surveys for logging the GPS location, type of forest cover, and condition of the scat — into four national parks and the wildlife corridors that tigers are thought to use.

The hope was they would collect 700 samples but the crew turned up 1,200 over two months.

“We collected a lot more s*&% than we thought we would,” Dibesh Karmacharya, executive director of the project, said to Mother Jones.

The poop project isn’t just useful to keep track of Bengal tiger numbers but also is a weapon to tackle poachers. If part of a tiger is confiscated from poachers, researchers can use the DNA to see if it’s been previously cataloged in their system.

The project was founded in 2011.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

“Although we can’t attribute the drought that caused the famine directly to climate change, it’s likely that climate change played a role,” said Harry Shannon, a professor at the McMaster University who was one of the contributors to the study.

The study was funded and commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia (FSNAU) and the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

Shannon said the Somalia famine means we can expect more droughts like this one in the future. “It’s also disturbing how long it took the aid agencies to react to the growing signs of famine," he said.

The study says a combination of events triggered the famine.

The year before the famine was declared it was the driest ever in the eastern Horn of Africa in 60 years. The result was widespread livestock deaths, the smallest cereal harvest since the 1991-94 civil war, and a major drop in labour demand, which reduced household income.

The UN declared the famine’s end in February 2012.

A recent study suggested that climate change played a role in Arab Spring. It said that interplay between climate change, food prices and politics is a hidden stressor that helped fuel the revolutions.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

The series is about $2,500 short of its target. The series — produced in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme and Youth Climate Report, a new agency with roots in Toronto — presents the latest climate research as reported by youth from around the world to international policymakers at UN conferences.

The campaign is hosted by Catalyst, a crowdfunding initiative of the Centre for Social Innovation. Its goal is to raise $7,500 in a month and with two days to go, nearly $5,000 has been raised.

“I’m overwhelmed by the support our project has received,” YCR founder John Kelly said in a statement. “A total of 64 backers from around the world are supporting us, with more expected. We have received contributions ranging from $1 to $1000.”

The funds are being raised to establish a country starter kit for Ghana. The kit will provide training to local youth reporters so they can participate in a dialogue with researchers about the effects of climate change in their country. The starter kit will be a model for other countries to use in setting up their own productions.

The film series is the third in a successful partnership between UNEP and the producers of The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning (COP15, Copenhagen, 2009) and The Polar Explorer (COP16, Cancun, 2010).

When this series is done, it will premiere at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in November in Warsaw, Poland.

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